Thursday, July 10, 2014

Caroline Lockhart, The Lady Doc (1912)

The “lady doc” of Caroline Lockhart’s
novel is by no means attractive but she is definitely dangerous. Practicing
medicine on the frontier with her only certification from a diploma mill, she
is untrained and lacks any ideals usually associated with her chosen
profession. She sees it only as a source of income. The lives, health, and
welfare of her patients are of little concern to her.

Plot. We first meet Emma Harpe as she is being
run out of a Nebraska town after the death of a patient, for which she faces a
malpractice suit. Sometime later, she steps off the train in a Wyoming
settlement called Crowheart.Always
looking for personal gain, she teams up with a land developer, Andy P. Symes,
who is looking for gullible investors in a massive, ill-conceived irrigation
project.

Emma Harpe

She persuades him to grant her the
contract for providing medical services to his many employees and workmen. Meanwhile,
she befriends his wife Augusta (“Gus”) and makes a nuisance of herself by
interfering in their marriage and home life.

With her bluff manner and dressing in
masculine clothes, Emma wins the hearts and minds of the local residents, who
trust her to practice the medical skills she claims to possess. But she soon
makes enemies of two men. One, an Italian frontiersman, whose public singing
earns him a nickname, “the Dago Duke.” The other is his friend Ogden Van
Lennop, from a wealthy family back East.

Van Lennop, in turn, befriends a pretty
girl, Essie Tisdale, who works as a waitress at the town’s best hotel, the
Terriberry House. Emma alienates the girl in a way the novel does not specify,
suggesting an uninvited intimacy, then punishes her by helping to make of her a
social outcast. With her eye on Van Lennop as a potential marriage partner for
herself, Emma pushes the disconsolate Essie into marriage with a 70-year-old sheep
rancher, then implicates her in the man’s death.

Essie and Van Lennop

By novel’s end both Emma and Symes are
unmasked as frauds, but not before they have done a lot of damage. Essie is
rescued by a long-lost relative and reunited after a separation from her true
love, Van Lennop.

Storytelling style. Lockhart is a keen
satirist. She skewers the self-important and self-serving and delights in
making fun of social pretensions among frontier townfolk. Here she introduces
Symes:

He was too fond of the limelight—it cheapened him; too broad in his attentions
to women—it coarsened him; his waistcoat was the dingy waistcoat of the man of
careless habits; his linen was not too immaculate and the nails of his blunt
fingers showed lack of attention. He was the sort of man who is nearly, but not
quite, a gentleman.

More alarming is her assessment of Emma,
who has joined the ranks of “illiterate graduates” of commercial medical
colleges, “totally unfitted by temperament and education for a profession that
calls for the highest and best, sending them out in hordes like licensed
murderers to prescribe and operate among the trusting and the ignorant.”

Her first patient in Crowheart is a girl with a broken leg, whom she refuses to treat until being paid $50 in advance. Later, a cowboy dies after the amputation of his arm following her negligent treatment of a gunshot wound.

The Dago Duke and friend

The novel is neatly plotted, with a cast
of colorful characters. Crowheart’s social events are opportunities for
unrestrained farce, as guests attempt to emulate what they construe to be the
dress and manners of polite society. Andy Symes’ wife appears at a dance with
“a marcelled pompadour, kimono sleeves, a peach-basket hat, and a hobble
skirt.”

Wrapping up. Born
in Illinois, Caroline Lockhart (1871-1962) worked as a journalist, settling in
Wyoming, where she began a career as a writer of western fiction. An opponent
of Prohibition, she acquired a weekly newspaper in Cody, and during her
lifetime actively promoted the preservation of western culture.

Lockhart wrote several novels set in the West, as well as
numerous short stories for the magazines. FictionMags Index lists more than 20
titles of her published fiction during the years 1902 – 1930, many of them
appearing in The Popular Magazine.
Three novels were adapted to film, including The Dude Wrangler (1930), advertised as “The story of a ‘PANSY’
cowboy—Oh, dear!” A biography by John Clayton, Cowboy Girl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart,was published by University of Nebraska Press in 2007.

Ron, I've heard of Caroline Lockhart and have even contemplated reading her books available online legally. However, I'd no idea she wrote anything like this. It's difficult to imagine a woman character like Emma Harpe in an early western. I wonder if the author might have based the character on a real life person.